Mark & Juanita wrote:
On Sun, 31 Dec 2006 22:56:21 GMT, Gunner wrote:

On Sun, 31 Dec 2006 09:42:51 -0600, Barbara Bailey
wrote:

On Sun, 31 Dec 2006 09:08:08 -0500, Doghouse
wrote:

Gunner wrote:

Last time I picked up bales from the ground..I was driving a tractor
hauling a bail loader. As long as the bale went into the chute...it
would stack em nice and neat on the trailer. Most modern farms do that
these days.

I worked on a dairy farm in 1969. Two of us stacked bales in a wagon
with eight-foot sides towed behind a baler. I'd grab the ejected bale
and toss it to the guy who was stacking.

IIRC, the baler tossed bales over the front side of the wagon. Now I'm
not sure about it. Bales tossed that high would probably have been
erratic. One of them could have broken my neck if I didn't see it
coming. A lot of them would probably have broken on impact.

Does anyone remember how balers tossed bales into towed wagons?
At abouut the same time, in northern Illinois, the hay wagons on my
uncles' farms, and other farms nearby, didn't have a front side. They
had slat-sides on the side-sides and at the rear, but nothing between
the baler and the catcher. The bales came out low, maybe a foot, a
foot and a half, above the bed of the wagon.
http://www.hoelscherinc.com/testimony_balestacker.htm
http://www.major-grasscare.com/agriculture/stacker.htm
http://www.hayingmantis.com/

etc etc

Find a need..they will invent.....


My dad uses a smaller version of one of the following:

http://www.newholland.com/h4/products/products_series_detail.asp?Reg=NA&RL=ENNA&NavID=00 0001277003&series=000005218311

These were developed in the late 60's and make the use of smaller bales
remain attractive to smaller farmers. I was lucky, my granddad was getting
to where he couldn't help stack hay and I being a young sprout of about 10
years old was not deemed sufficiently "robust" to be able to help stack all
of the hay. So Dad invested in a New Holland bale wagon. Remarkably
clever design yet almost dead stupid in the relatively small number of
moving parts required to make this miracle of mechanical and hydraulic
engineering work.



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If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough

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I was going to suggest that it is popular with any farmer that puts up
more than a few hundred squares a year. I think they self propelled ones
are over $100,000. My regular hay farmer bought a new one last year. It
was about 20 years old or more and had been sitting in a barn with
broken out windows. A little paint and sweeping out of the glass any he
had a newer than his old one bale wagon. Under 10,000 for a good used
machine with relatively low hours. The problem that the farmers have
here is that the old barns were not built high enough to tip a full
stack. Some guys have to skip the last row or two because they stack is
too tall when tipped. Of course farmers that built barns in anticipation
of the automatic bale wagon have no issues. They can also stack the
round bales 3 bales tall inside the barn.

The old farms on my mother's side did not have hay storage like that. I
remember playing in the lofts tossing I guess Timothy squares about. It
was eastern Indiana so it definitely was not Bermuda. My dad tells tales
of helping gather hay when he was a kid so that was 70+ years ago. Pitch
forks, hay wagon and people stomping on the stacks to get more on the
wagon. Internal combustion powered machinery has definitely reduced a
lot of human labor. Kind of like electricity in a wood shop.